> For example, our large authoring DTDs have over eight separate things> that end up as italic. It would do no one any good to simply say> "make all italics 14pt bold".> Whereas, it would help them to say> "make program variables bold".

>-- End of {edited} excerpt from Dave Hollander

Dave's example illustrates the crux of all this blustering and frustration --
Moving a structurally tagged document into one or more presentation tagged
forms may be tedious, *but*, _it can be automated_. The reverse operation
*requires* human intervention of the most soul-destroying variety -- i.e.,
sitting there, telling the machine what you meant every time it has
insufficient information to figure out if *this* italicized string was
italicized because it was a this or a that. (Note that the victim of this
task is generally the author -- the only one who possesses this information).

I appreciate and share the frustration with the current inadequate presentation
tools for HTML, but expediency is the mother of all kludges -- Bosak's HDL
proposal makes sense -- please consider it carefully and help fine tune it
into being.